Rutherford B. Hayes’ election did not go smoothly. The November election produced an apparent Democratic victory (Hayes was a Republican), but disputed returns from Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Oregon, whose total electoral vote was 20, threw the election in doubt. Tilden had undisputed claim to 184 electoral votes, only one short of a majority, but Hayes could still win if he managed to receive all 20 disputed votes. Since the Constitution had established no concrete method, A Special Electoral Commission was put together, which gave Hayes all the votes, making him President. There were politics behind the decisions, however. This was known as the Compromise of 1877, and was the agreement that by cooperating, the Southern Democrats (among them some former Whigs) exacted several pledges form the Republicans in addition to withdrawal of troops: the appointment of at least one Southerner to the Hayes cabinet, control of federal patronage in their areas, generous internal improvements, and federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad. The framers of this compromise hoped for a further industrialized South, and this began to occur under Hayes. After the withdrawal of troops, every southern state government had been “redeemed” – political power had been restored to the Democrats. Once again, the South fell under the control of a powerful, conservative oligarchy, whose members were known variously as the “Redeemers" (to themselves and their supporters) or the “Bourbons” (a term for aristocrats used by some of their critics). In the late 1870s Virginia, a vigorous “Readjuster” movement emerged, demanding that the state revise its debt payment procedures as to make more money available for state services. New values were emerging in the South, as the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Henry Grady, advocated for the virtues of thrift, industry, and progress. Their goal was to ‘out Yankee the Yankees’. Under Rutherford, there was great Railroad Development in the South, the somewhat abusive “Convict-lease” System arose, and sharecropping and the crop-lien system emerged. However, racial strife also emerged, hand in hand with the rising Black middle class. Booker T. Washington outlined a philosophy of race relations that became widely known as the Atlanta Compromise: “The wisest among my race understand” he said, “that the agitation of the question of social equality is the extremest folly”, and advocated that African Americans should struggle for economic gain, to show that they too had an economic value to America, something that would convince others of their importance. This was also the age of the birth of the Jim Crow Laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the restriction of the franchise of African Americans.